natural sounds

We didn’t make it to Burning Man this year, after all, and for the last several weeks I’ve been looking up at the early morning and late afternoon sun and thinking to myself, “I know this light. I know this angle. It all seems so familiar to me.”

Of course, I know where I know it from.

I recognize it like I recognize that promise of exasperating heat on each and every cold morning. The bone-chilling cold creeping up on an unbearably hot, lazy day. There are fewer costumes as I walk around Los Angeles, not as many crazy lights (and no fires … yet), but every now and then I catch a smell or hear a little something … different.

It’s like trying to read street signs in a car that’s moving way to fast. I want it all to slow down but I know I’ve already missed my exit. At least this year.

Those of us left behind had precious little information about how things were going, how they went. Current TV was fun to watch. And the wifi in Center Camp meant that a few pictures a day trickled onto flickr.

So the greatest lifeline was SF photographer John Curley posting to the Burning Blog. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to try to synthesize in the middle of all that madness, let alone write something coherent. His words came as oxygen to those of us trapped out here in all this smog.

He uploaded his last post late last night. And it strikes me as one of the best sums of the event I’ve ever read. At least, it comes the closest to describing my own feelings about it.

The section about church is inspired. And the playa’s serendipity is much discussed in our own camp (for example, a friend of a campmate told him to watch out for one particular guy on the playa and, if he saw him, to give him a message. My friend’s like, yeah, right, forty-thousand-some-odd people and I’m supposed to find one guy? A week later, he drives up to the event gates and — look! –  there the guy is. Right there. Welcoming him into Black Rock City).

From “Let’s do that again some time…:”

The dust is out of your hair and your clothes. You’ve been sleeping in your own bed again, and maybe you’ve been out to eat. And you’ve gone to the refrigerator in the middle of the night, and you’ve had whatever you damn well pleased, because you could.

And isn’t it sad? …

I waited a week before getting the playa out of my car. It turns out that after all that time and all that wind and all that heat, I discovered on the long ride home that I really really loved the smell of the dust, and I wanted to hang onto it as long as possible. And when I washed the car, the last physical remnants of the experience would be washed away, too. And I wasn’t ready for that. Not at all.

I know at least one other person who can relate this year.

And the paragraph that starts, “And by then you’ll forget about the hardest stuff …” makes me cry.

And the sentence, “And then, when you begin to forget about the hard stuff, when the weather has turned wet and cold, and the warm sun is only a memory, you’ll start to get the longing again.” That strikes me as particularly true.

And I guess after four straight years of doing the same beautiful thing (always in completely different ways), my body’s gotten used to the way the sun reflects off me and those I love, the way the dust feels in my hair and the creases of my lover’s body, the way serendipity begins to be something you can count on, the way we mark the end of summer, the beginning of fall and another rotation around our star.

Missing it this year has opened the door to another world of brilliance, that’s true, and neither my wife nor I think we made the wrong choice. But it also means that longing was never sated. And, to be honest, waiting has never been a particular strength of mine. I already know that patience is going to be a lesson for the little one to teach.